Religion Q&A

Hey everybody. I got a lot of questions about religion in the recent Q&A, so I thought I would do a post devoted to addressing some of them. I’ll address the questions on other topics in the next post. Also, I’m finally just about unpacked, which means I’m back on schedule and will have a new installment of The Peculiar Institution out soon. I’m also seeing light at the end of the tunnel for the next Whose America episode.

Also, I know I owe you guys a few audio versions. I just tried to record one, but the cottonwoods around my house have my allergies aflame and trust me, it was truly awful. I’ll take another crack at it tomorrow evening, and, God willing, I’ll knock out the last three and get them out to you.

---

Subscriber Eddie furtigan asks:

I'd really like you to discuss your religious views a little bit. IIRC, you've said you're a Christian, but you seem to have some atypical beliefs (?) The spiritual/religious things you have discussed have resonated a lot with me, but I've never heard you say anything explicitly about where you are and what you believe. Thanks.

I think this ended up answer another question from kedynscrow as well.

Hello Eddie, thanks for your question. Well, as I’ve said before, it’s the things we don’t choose that really make us who we are. By the time we come to our senses and try to get a grip on the direction and purpose of our lives, there is already so much momentum behind us that our choices usually amount to minor course corrections, in the grand scheme of things. It’s like waking up from a deep slumber in full combat gear, with explosions everywhere and bullets zipping by. People are shooting at you, and a sergeant is in your face telling you to man the machine gun… From the first moment, you’re so busy trying not to get shot that you never have time or inclination to ask how you got there, or whether you’re fighting for a just cause, or how it is that you seem to have the bone-deep habits and muscle memory of a soldier. The demands of the environment and the people around you are so immediate that your agency is confined to a narrow range of real choices - duck or shoot, retreat or advance, mount an assault or call in air support. You can choose to be a hero or a coward, a good soldier or a bad soldier, but the decision to be a soldier was made before you woke up.

That’s a long preface to make the simple point that the basic structure of my religious beliefs were set in cement long before I ever thought to question or compare them. I was raised in a family composed of spare parts and repurposed materials from the deracinated lower classes. My mother’s side gave me a 23andMe profile that covers at least half of the European continent - from Britain to the Balkans, from Germany to Spain. My father’s side was old stock Anglo, but they were the stereotype of a broken down Okie family that fled the Dust Bowl to make themselves a plague upon the nice people of California. I didn’t grow up in a church, let alone in “the Church” - someone raised in a parish neighborhood, or pushed through Hebrew school whether he liked it or not, would conclude that I wasn’t raised with any religion at all. Yet, while it’s true that I wasn’t raised in a religious tradition, everyone in my family - even ones who never went to church and lived in sin - sort of took it for granted God was real and was somehow concerned for us individually, that Jesus “died for our sins” (even if they never gave much thought to what that meant), and that the rules we violate by lying, stealing, or being needlessly cruel were not relative, but universal. And so from a very early age I took all those things for granted, too. I could critique, analyze, even rebel against them, but they were there before I even had a personality, and the two grew together, intertwined.

So much for the part I didn’t choose. Being raised without a strong religious tradition has some of the same advantages and disadvantages as being an autodidact. On one hand, it frees you up to ask questions and explore paths that would hardly occur to someone more classically trained. On the other hand, you can get stuck on shoals charted long ago by others, and that you could’ve avoided had you known about the map.

Somewhere in my late teens I found Joseph Campbell, first through The Power of Myth series he did with Bill Moyers, then his book Hero With a Thousand Faces. Then I read his series The Masks of God, a four-volume work with a book dedicated to each of Primitive, Occidental, Oriental, and Creative Mythology (this last was his term for the mythology of the modern West, beginning with the Medieval period). These books opened up a whole new world for me. Up to that point (I’m maybe 19 or so), I knew there were Muslims and Jews, I’d heard of Buddhism and probably Hinduism. I knew the planets were named after either Greek or Roman gods, and I’d heard of Thor from Marvel comics. What I knew about primitive religion mostly came from watching The Gods Must Be Crazy. Campbell’s Masks of God series introduced me to the whole range of world mythology, and made a convincing case that many of them shared common roots, and were dispersed throughout the world by human migration and cultural appropriation. I eventually moved past Campbell, and I even cringe at some passages now that I recognize how steeped they were in 1960s self-actualization Esalen consciousness claptrap. But I’ll always be grateful to Campbell, and most of what I think owes at least an indirect debt to him.

Campbell often talked about the great pre-war writers, especially Joyce, Mann, Eliot, and Proust, so I read their books (I even took a crack at Finnegan’s Wake, to no great result, I regret to say). When I was done with those, I read the other greats from the same era - Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, etc - and in this way became acquainted with a lot of the great literature I should have learned about in school. Campbell frequently mentioned some German called Oswald Spengler, and his book The Decline of the West - a book he said had been a problem with which most intellectuals of his era felt obliged to contend. Maybe it was because it arrived at a certain time in my life and development, but that book changed the way I saw just about everything.

Spengler was an old school conservative German - the stodgy type of traditionalist for whom Hitler and the NSDAP were too radical and innovative, too middle class, to be taken seriously. He writes in that Teutonic style that often borders on pomposity, but it’s appropriate to his subject matter. Volume I of Decline was published in summer 1918, as the consequences of the failed German spring offensive were setting in, and Germany rolled toward its inevitable defeat in the Great War. Spengler was not so provincial as to equate his own country’s defeat with the decline of Western civilization, though. In fact, he was, in some ways, a forerunner of historical postmodernism long before that term had been invented. At the outset, he instructs the reader to rid himself of the outdated framework that conceives of history as a three-part structure - Ancient, Medieval, Modern - and makes Western Civilization the sun around which all other cultures orbit. Each civilization was its own complete world, with a sovereign character and destiny of its own. Each had a life-cycle that carried it through birth, growth, maturity, old-age, and death, and, while each civilization was wholly different from the others, the seasons of their life cycles were similar in shape. He showed how past civilizations had passed through these predictable stages without fail, and that the West itself had followed this trajectory up Spengler’s time. Spengler’s theory is much richer and more complex than that simple summary, and I will write more on the topic if people are interested.

Anyway, after Spengler, I sought out any grand theory of history or religion I could find. I read ‘em all - Toynbee, Quigley, Gebser, Riencourt, Yockey, Chardin, Aurobindo, Marx, Vico, you name it. Then I read the Perennialists - Guenon, Schuon, Burkhardt, Huxley, and the rest. I read about meditation, shamanism, sacrifice, occultism, and ethnographies of obscure tribes from all over the world. I don’t mean to simply name drop. Those familiar with any of the authors I’ve mentioned will notice a pattern - namely, that they all tended to lead me away from the idea common to Abrahamic monotheists - Muslims, Jews, and my fellow Christians - that there is one truth, which coincidentally happens to be the one I already possess, and everything else is deviant and evil. The basic problem of life is how to stave off nihilism and despair despite living in a world defined by impermanence, where the only rule is ceaseless change, and change is experienced as suffering and loss. I’m a Christian, so I believe that Christianity sees the whole picture while other religions see only in part, but all men, including Christians, perceive God through a dark fog, as we grope for something solid and permanent on which to set our feet.

The drawback to this approach is that, once seen it cannot be unseen, and while it perhaps has allowed me to take in a broader landscape, it also means I will never have the mystical experience of a saint. I’d be lying if I claimed not to envy people who were brought up firmly ensconced in a tradition, who can focus on their relationship to God because they have bone deep certainty about questions I’ve spent years spinning my wheels over. But you can’t put the fruit back on the tree once a bite has been taken out of it, and I suppose if I was truly offered the opportunity to choose a path, I’d probably still take the one I did.

Anyway, after this long journey - and I’ve only mentioned a fraction of it - I came full circle back to simple Christianity. I had never left the faith, but there may have been a year or two when I was like one of those obnoxious students who knowingly refers to it as “the Christian myth,” and noted the similarities of Christ to other dying and resurrected gods. Ugh. It’s almost as bad as remembering my early days as a libertarian. In both cases, leveling up involved shedding some pride, and admitting that I didn’t know nearly as much as I was letting on. Christians better and smarter than me have spent two thousand years thinking about and discussing every question I could ever think to ask, and it would take several lifetimes for me to even get caught up, let alone add something, to the conversation.

Subscriber Sam asks:

Anyways on to the question. I was on a date last night with your typical leftist atheist 25 year old girl. Instead of trying to get laid I asked her about religion (and promptly didn’t get laid). We chatted for a long time about this and how I think the rise of secularism is a troubling. My argument hinged on there being a vacuum opened with no real clue what comes next to fill that void. Long winded way to get here, but what do you see the masses worshiping as the sublimation of religion continues?

Brother, let me give you some unsolicited advice. If you want to discuss the troubling rise of secularism, or have arguments that hinge on vacuums and voids, get yourself a friend. When you’re on a date, your entire focus should be on keeping her in a positive emotional state. There will be plenty of time for arguing about politics and religion if you get married - and even then, you should mostly do that with your friends. You don’t want to go on a date and be this guy:

As for your actual question, well, the masses will worship whatever is put in front of them as an object of worship. It used to seem very strange to me when I would read about a king or tribal chieftain converting to Christianity or Islam, and by extension his entire tribe or kingdom converting with him. That doesn’t really make sense to us: just because Barack Obama was a Muslim didn’t lead the American citizenry to recite the shahada (I’m kidding… or am I? I am.) (Or am I?) But it doesn’t really seem strange to me anymore. People will worship whatever is put in front of them by people or institutions they perceive as powerful and authoritative. In the 20th century, the mass media became the priesthood - in it was vested extraordinary centralized power to create and interpret popular myths and the civil religion. Today, as that power is fragmented by the internet, people are splitting off into a million new sects worshipping almost anything you can imagine. Surely the fragmentation will eventually give way to a new consolidation. No sooner had Medieval Christendom been cracked open by the printing press than nationalism, socialism, and other children of the printing press collected the fragmented peoples into even larger conglomerations. What form that will take in this iteration is hard to say.

Subscriber David T writes:

I might have asked you something similar in the past, but, did you ever have an edgy atheist phase? If so, why did you (I assume) seemingly come back to Christianity? What are some of Christ's (or your church's) teachings that you might struggle with the most?

Absolutely not. If anything, as mentioned above, I had a gay “Christ and Horus are ackshually very similar” phase, but the existence and central importance of God or the spiritual world have always been self-evident to me. I could compare and critique different religious systems, but I’ve never been able to take atheism of the Dawkins/Harris variety seriously enough to even criticize it.

As for which of Christ’s teachings I struggle with the most, isn’t the answer the same for everybody? “Love your enemy, and pray for the one who persecutes you.” I mean, damn, that is a hard saying, and we can’t throw any excuses or “yeah buts” at the man who did just that on the way to his own crucifixion. Any Christian who says he doesn’t have a hard time with that one can add “lying” to his list of struggles.

Subscriber Jeff Smith asks:

Darryl, You’ve made some posts recently about Yahweh in the OT and Jesus in the NT and the perceived differences in tone and messaging. What is your take on Jesus himself claiming to fulfill the OT and his proclamation that the OT would never pass away? Also, the NT claim of Hebrews 13:8?

My view is, Jesus fulfilled the Law in the same way one fulfills a contract. Covenant, in the Old Testament, is synonymous with contract, and God’s covenants are presented identically to how contracts were sealed in the ancient Near East. “I will do this, if you will do that, and a curse be upon me if I fail to meet my obligation.” The Covenant was binding on God just as it was binding on man, but the contract turned out to be one-sided - as God says through Ezekiel, “I gave them statutes that were not good, and laws by which they could not live.” No one could meet the obligations of the Law, and so God’s end of the contract was never activated. But even the Ezekiel verse I just quoted seems to represent a level of self-reflection absent from God in earlier texts - as if he were becoming more aware of what mankind had been going through down here all this time. But a deal is a deal, and a divine contract cannot be abrogated simply because it proves to be unfulfillable, and so, in his compassion, God sent his son to become a man and fulfill it on our behalf. Jesus did that and, in accordance with the Law, was ultimately sacrificed as a sin offering, freeing mankind from its curses, and ending the exile of Israel - though not in the way most Jews had hoped. They wanted a military messiah to reestablish the sovereignty of Jerusalem and lead them to victory over the hated Gentiles, but God’s plan was to end the exile by erasing the distinction between Jew and Gentile in Christ.

Many Jews rejoiced at this outcome, but most were like the elder brother of the Prodigal Son, or the servants who were paid the same for a full day’s work as those hired to work for only part of the day - resentful that, after all they had been through on behalf of their father (or the vineyard owner), they were now expected to accept the latecomers as equal children of God. My view is that the Jewish religion was profoundly corrupted during the Second Temple period, when separateness at-all-costs became the raison d’etre of the tradition, and hatred of Gentiles became its defining feature. This is the recurring theme in every passage written about the Jews by Greek, Roman, and other ancient writers, and it is a recurring theme in the Gospels and the New Testament. Paul wrote that the Jews had become “enemies of the whole human race,” and Jesus, who hailed from a Hellenized region held in suspicion by Jerusalem fundamentalists,  created a scandal by reaching out to Samaritans, Greeks, and Romans. The path of Christ is presented as an either-or choice between Jesus, who counseled to “love your enemy and pray for him who persecutes you,” and Barabbas, the violent revolutionary whose path shortly led to the destruction of Jerusalem, and the end of the Israelite religion for all time.

Rabbinical Judaism as we know it was a continuation of the Pharisaical tradition, and took its current shape, in the first few centuries AD largely as a polemical reaction to the rise of Christianity. Stubborn insistence on separateness (that is, on continued exile) became the essence of Judaism (and Christians, through their behavior over the years, have unfortunately done more than our share to reinforce this tendency). It is not a coincidence, I think, that the three great Jewish military rebellions came at precisely the time when assimilation was at a peak and boundaries were becoming blurred - the Maccabean revolt against Seleucid Hellenization, the suicidal wars to escape Pax Romana, and the Zionist stand against assimilation after Jewish emancipation. Jesus came to free Israel from the yoke of the Law, and to redeem the world and ransom mankind by presenting his own body and blood as a sin offering. In Jesus, the OT prophecies that all the nations would be blessed through Israel have been fulfilled, and, because of him, knees on every continent bow to the god of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

This answer already ran long, so we’ll have to talk about Hebrews 13 another time.

Subscriber First World Refugee asks:

Are you Catholic/what are your thoughts on Catholicism?

I am not a Catholic. My sister and many of my other favorite people are, though. I’d like to see the Church take a tougher line on pederasty, and they were real dicks during the Fourth Crusade, but any institution that’s been around for two millennia is going to have some ups and downs.

Subscriber Anthony J Carvalho asks:

Satan’s offer on the mountaintop is the same one repeated by Yahweh to the Jews throughout the Old Testament: now down and worship me, and I will give you the whole world, whose peoples “will fall prostrate before you, faces to the ground, and lick the dust at your feet.”

Quoting you above, I am curious if this is genuinely how you view these two occurrences?

Well, objectively the statement is true. Satan offers Jesus the kingdoms of the earth in exchange for exclusive worship, and Yahweh in the Old Testament repeatedly swears to lay waste to the nations and reduce them to footstools at Jerusalem’s feet if only the Jews would satisfy his demands for worship and obedience. I don’t necessarily know what to do with the information, but it seems undeniable that the offers were identical. I could talk about this a lot more, and I probably will in the near future, but it’s almost 8 pm and I promised myself I’d record this and the previous two audio versions tonight. So… next time.

Thanks for reading.